Medvejie Race
Dear Editor: Another successful fundraiser for the Sitka High track and cross country teams. Thanks to all the runners who came out and supported the cause. It wouldn’t be a fundraiser without you!
Thank you again to our sponsors: Allen Marine, Christine Harrington, CPA, Foreign Automotive, Neurobehavioral Consultants LLC, Petro Marine and SEARHC.
And thanks to all the folks who came out to help on the day of race and behind the scenes: Jan and Terry Lovett, Charles Horan, Denny Lewis, Rob Woolsey, Tasha Folsom, Julie White, Daily Sitka Sentinel and Sitka Mountain Rescue and Captain Ron Duvall.
See you next year.
Murray Lawson, Carolyn Heuer
Medvejie Race
Path of Hope Walk
Dear Editor: On behalf of the Sitka Cancer Survivor Society, we wish to thank all those who attended last Sunday at the Path of Hope walk, celebrating June Cancer Survivor Month.
We did have a good turnout. We thank the Sitka Emblem Club 142 for providing yummy cookies and Russian tea refreshments. The weather held out but we were ready with a tent to keep the cookies dry! Those who attended had the opportunity to meet Steve Lawrie and Susan Padilla who help keep the park in excellent condition. Dennis and Bobbi Carlson were unfortunately out of town. They are the other couple who help in there. It was so good to meet people who have never walked through the park and to celebrate with other cancer survivors. We are planning to make this an annual event in June every year.
We thank the Sitka Sentinel for all the press they gave us for this event, and for the Sitka Weekend edition article. We encourage all in Sitka to take the time and walk through the Path of Hope and enjoy the beautiful, peaceful surroundings. The more we are all aware of the park and use it, hopefully it will keep the vandalism down. The park is for all of us in Sitka.
If anyone knows of someone who has been recently diagnosed with cancer and in need of help with medical expenses, travel, etc., please have them contact one of the following board members for a mini grant application form. Thanks, again, Sitka.
Sitka Cancer Survivor Society
Board Members,
Susan Suarez, President,
Candi Barger, Vice President,
Linda Janacek, Co-Secretary,
Jill Scheidt, Co-Secretary,
Bonnie Richards, Quilt Sales,
Gloria Scigliano, Treasurer,
Carolyn Fredrickson, Publicity
Citizens Climate Lobby
Dear Editor: I’m writing in response to the recent back-and-forth about Citizens Climate Lobby, the national effort to impose a fee-and-dividend structure whereby a fee would be attached to the carbon content of fuels and the dividends from those fees would be distributed to households nationwide.
Like Larry Edwards (LTE, Friday June 23), I find myself unable to support the Citizens Climate Lobby. As eager as I am to see firm climate action take hold, and as much as I want to support the many people in Sitka who are working hard to address climate change, this fee-and-dividend proposal is one that I see as dangerously incomplete. As Larry wrote in his letter, there are big problems with accountability and agency in this proposal - the action proposed by the Citizens Climate Lobby lets everybody off the hook, leaving the hard work of solving climate change to the free market and the unscrupulous power-mongers who dominate it.
On the face of it, the CCL is pushing a very sensible and humble proposal which will theoretically incentivize a transition from fossil fuels. Perhaps people will use their dividends to install solar panels or buy compost bins or tune up their bicycles or help people migrate from parts of the earth that are no longer hospitable. More likely though, if our experience with dividends in Alaska is any indication, people will treat those dividends as happy bonuses, and dividend day will become another consumer holiday, an occasion for purchasing flights and accessories which will help us keep pace with the speed and convenience of modern life.
The strength of the model, especially in this political climate, lies in its conformity to the status quo, making it an easy pill to swallow for politicians and their funders. But for me, that is also the weakness – the approach doesn’t match the crisis that we face. As a standalone policy package, CCL just isn’t enough – it needs to be blended with a massive push to activate a clean energy economy (and workforce), a clear path towards the total repeal of fossil fuel subsidies, a commitment to accurate climate education, and a zero tolerance policy for sociopathic corporate behavior.
This is a wait-and-see proposal that just doesn’t add up, and the passing of as humble a proposal as this will allow politicians to kick the can for another decade as we wait for one set of big changes but instead get another, as the atmospheric and ocean conditions for climate change worsen. Most alarming is that it seems likely that CCL’s proposals will be co-opted by the Climate Leadership Council, and it will be their industry-friendly version which will be adopted as the great climate gesture of this administration.
I will sign off on most anything that pushes the needle on climate change, but I fear that CCL’s agenda will foster the blend of apathy and appetite which have got us in this mess to begin with by recommitting to the free market as civilizational savior.
On a societal level, we need to quickly make a transition towards looking at climate change as a catastrophe rather than an inconvenience. We can have a bright future, but it won’t be easy and it will take a bumpy road. As citizen activists, we need to give ourselves space to dream big and to ask our politicians to do the same. It is in this failure of imagination that the CCL fails for me; far from rosily idealistic, the CCL proposal is tediously pragmatic, a citizen-driven compromise balancing corporate interests against the future of the planet.
Peter Bradley, Sitka
